{"id":117123,"date":"2012-01-26T18:47:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-26T23:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/what-google-really-wants-from-the-google-search-plus-your-world\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:40:16","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:40:16","slug":"what-google-really-wants-from-the-google-search-plus-your-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/what-google-really-wants-from-the-google-search-plus-your-world\/","title":{"rendered":"What Google really wants from Search Plus Your World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of the world’s conflicts can be boiled down to a pretty simple cause: you have something, \u00a0I want it, and if you don’t give it to me I’ll get it from you one way or another. The ongoing dust up\u00a0between Google and the web’s social media<\/a> titans is no exception.\u00a0When Google launched Google Search Plus Your World<\/u> a couple of weeks ago, the war for the two things that Google covets the most officially began.<\/p>\n

Google has always relied on (and advocated for) an open web. The desire by consumers to find specific information from billions of web pages and Google’s persistent ability to effectively deliver that information has made Google what it is today. As such, Google’s two biggest problems are the growing amount of user generated content that it can’t crawl and the content that it can’t crawl fast enough to matter. After all, it’s hard to organize the world’s information when you can’t get at a whole bunch of it.<\/p>\n

The rise of Facebook and Twitter have therefore created a conundrum for Google. Most of what is shared and created on Facebook is behind a permission-based wall, and the torrent of user generated content being shared on Twitter is coming at a clip that Google has been unable to crawl, index and rank fast enough to make it relevant. For a while, Google was getting a direct feed of tweets that it was returning in its search results in near real time, but that agreement (which made for a very nice user experience) ended when Twitter walked away from the negotiations last year (reportedly over price).<\/p>\n

All of this is why, after quite a few stumbles, Google came up with a viable social network of its own in Google+. Google+ is a nice mix of Twitter and Facebook, allowing for quick, real-time updates and flexible settings to allow for appropriate sharing of information and privacy. The problem is, despite a nice interface and feature set, Google+ has not come within spitting distance of Twitter and especially Facebook since launching over the summer (see the list of the top social networking sites from Hitwise here).<\/p>\n

So, it really shouldn’t be any great surprise that Google would tweak the presentation of its search results to raise the profile of Google+. What caught people off guard was the boldness of Google Search Plus Your World, which displays social results for Google+ above the fold and excludes results from sites like Facebook and Twitter. These results are a mix of public information on Google+ and things that your connections have shared on the site. This has resulted in a huge outcry from the search community (see Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan rant about it here<\/a>), and, not surprisingly, the rest of the social media properties aren’t all that pleased either. In fact, this move has so enraged Facebook and Twitter, that they have come together with MySpace (apparently still kicking) and created a site called Focus on the User<\/a>. The site is a collaboration between engineers at those properties that takes Google’s own data<\/a>\n

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